Phobos: A front-end approach to extensible compilers (long version)

This paper describes a practical approach for implementing certain types of domain-specific languages with extensible compilers. Given a compiler with one or more front-end languages, we introduce the idea of a "generic" front-end that allows the syntactic and semantic specification of domain-specific languages. Phobos, our generic front-end, offers modular language specification, allowing the programmer to define new syntax and semantics incrementally

The Unsupervised Acquisition of a Lexicon from Continuous Speech

We present an unsupervised learning algorithm that acquires a natural-language lexicon from raw speech. The algorithm is based on the optimal encoding of symbol sequences in an MDL framework, and uses a hierarchical representation of language that overcomes many of the problems that have stymied previous grammar-induction procedures. The forward mapping from symbol sequences to the speech stream is modeled using features based on articulatory gestures. We present results on the acquisition of lexicons and language models from raw speech, text, and phonetic transcripts, and demonstrate that our algorithm compares very favorably to other reported results with respect to segmentation performance and statistical efficiency.Comment: 27 page technical repor